A Diamond's Beginning
by Invariant
Summary: For years he must have considered the implication, being born of recklessness; just the creation of some lewd act twenty years ago, and it sinks her heart. In the live action world, Jasmine searches for answers to a question of parentage Aladdin doesn't want asked. In the meantime, Aladdin still struggles to acclimate. Takes place after "A Diamond in the Rough." Complete.
1. Chapter 1

Worked on this for a while. Thought I'd publish it.

Reviews are appreciated. They make me want to write more. Love to all. :)

Disclaimer: I don't own the characters.

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They've spent the last two afternoons here, in his hovel above the city; an escape from pomp and propriety to be just authentically, openly themselves. Since, their first day together this is the place where they both feel most at peace, intimate and raw in the way they can't be when governing a kingdom prioritizes their time.

There's a fragrant breeze here, sea-salt and hot clay, a contrast to the florals and cardamom surrounding the halls of their palace, the walls of their gardens; the sweet-smelling pressure of managing an empire.

As much as she adores her new station, trained for being Sultana her whole life, there's something freeing in the way she watches him sprawl across the rough-wall ledge, with a spry carelessness he's cautious with now, in bright colors, in different clothes, in the eye of expectation. The daylight plays across his boyish features, his strong brow and cheekbones, to halo him in a mid-day glory that warms in her chest to settle under her skin.

Here, he's relaxed, comfortable, so she demands the council, the guards and even her father accept the kind of freedom never permitted the Sultanate before; liberties without limitations.

In the height of being a ruler, he's her wild abandon.

He told her, days ago, in their bed chamber, that he wearies of his ability to rule beside her, unsure if he'll ever find the self-confidence it takes to play the role their love stepped him into. But it's a fallacy, his good heart and character make him more apt then any prince she's ever met, and she told him so, on that night, and he promised to trust in her belief and not his own.

And she's noticed small things, like how he stands a little straighter in citadel meetings, recommends to her, imperial verdicts with less hesitation, and even proposed a peaceful resolution to the territory conflict in Morocco. The same judgement she'd fashioned from years of study, he'd suggested in days.

Contrary to what he thinks, this life suits him, and he, her.

But allowing time to be away from it all is a gift she can give him. And in retrospect, herself.

She listens and watches as his fingers strum the udo she'd played when they first met, the music soft and melodic, a tune she imagines he taught himself in the years before her when the loneliness needed distraction. He has one leg tucked under him, the other dangles, every sway backwards rubbing the belly of the large cat below him; their tiger stretched across the floor, an orange and black purr of content.

Even Rajah knows how remarkable he is.

And she wonders now if the peace she feels in her veins belongs to her or to him. Or both.

She's never felt this connected to anyone before him, this innate synchronicity of soul and spirit that hums below her flesh, as if everything he feels echoes inside every part of her, and her heart beats a little faster on the thought.

It was night six when they consummated their relationship, when what they felt separately merged to pool in her core; a molten heat of desire, lust and passion; the afterglow a permanent tattoo of the physical satisfaction she finds in his love.

He's tender and beautiful in every way possible.

The thought makes her bite her lip, play with the purple threads of her sleeve as she feels a growing heat in the middle of her body, a hot excitement span below her belly, and she wonders for a moment what would happen if right now, she had every naked inch of him under her fingertips. There's no door here, in this run-down tower, no walls to shield them from the eye of the people, and the thought of such a rebellion races her pulse.

"I know you're thinking of me naked."

She hears the words, throaty and low, and instantly, she feels embarrassed, caught, excited. It makes her shift in her spot on the floor.

"Am I?"

"You're thinking..." He begins, eyes still on the instrument. "If I were to just take him, right here, right now, how much of a scandal would that really create?"

This makes her body hitch, in both exhilaration and shame, and she'd be damned if his astute presumption didn't turn her on even more.

"I was thinking if I even cared."

This makes him look up at her, and when he smirks, those gorgeous dimples light his face.

"You care." He says, and she swallows. He knows it's her father's judgement of such indecent press and not modesty that's stopping her.

"Maybe." She resigns.

"I'll have you know…" He begins. "That I've thought about you naked for half the time we've been here."

She bites down harder on her lip.

"And what did you do with the rest of the time?"

When he looks at her, his eyes are dark under heavy lashes, a russet desire sparking her blood, but it's gone as soon as it came, replaced with something else, an ocher glint of knowing he's caught her in the tease.

"I wondered if maybe we need to get Abu some pants."

On this the monkey in the corner squeaks disapprovingly, and Jasmine hits her lover with the pillow she'd been propped on. Satisfied with himself, he chuckles.

This is how he keeps her heart happy.

And it's now she thinks again; how her mother would have loved him, and the thought sinks her spirit to her toes, a depression of her body that's weighted her to the floor.

_What happened_? He'd asked her on night three, and she'd told him the story; how her mother was the princess of Sherabot, the first Arabian port-kingdom to trade with the South India Import company. And because of this, her mother was betrothed to a Spaniard since childhood, a political means to unite trade kingdoms, and encourage diplomatic relation.

_He was Juan Santiago Francesco and he was a Duke, a man of great nobility and influence. And my mother was promised to him, _she'd told him, laying on his chest,_ but she chose to love my father instead. She chose her heart over her duty and the betrayal had enraged the Duke unrelentingly. It's said that he lost a considerable portion of his wealth. He couldn't protect the trade routes my mother's hand would have secured_.

_So, he'd financed a mercenary, an assassin from Beijing_, she'd told him, and she'd choked up before recollecting that she had been six, and they were going to meet the merchant boats from China at the harbor.

_He'd traveled by the ships_, she'd said to him, _smuggled by the Spanish aristocrat to get revenge on my father, on my mother,_ she'd told him with wet heat behind her eyes, _the assassin had a sword_, she'd paused on the vision, not able to voice the stabbing, but she knew he understood.

_And right there, on the edge of the dock my mother died._ He'd wiped a tear from her cheek then, and held her tighter, kissed the top of her head in the breeze of early morning. And with sadness, she'd reminisced to him the fear, the anger of a little girl left in a world without her mother.

_I'm so sorry_, was all he'd said then, and stroked her bare arm, a means of comfort, and to distract herself from the pain of the loss, she'd crushed her mouth to his, finding relief in the kind of love that can wound a kingdom.

And it's now she appreciates the song he's playing, a soft strum of music that ushers her back from herself; the lullaby he told her once he'd learned from his mother, and she realizes now he's never really told her more of his heritage.

"What was she like?" she asks him, "your Mother?"

As if pondering her question, he continues to play for a few seconds and then, his gaze is lost to her, in a memory somewhere where he's trying to find his past.

"I remember she taught me this song." He says finally, picking at the strings, "but I don't remember much else."

Then suddenly, he stops, as if he's discovered something in that distant place, and he puts down the instrument, rises to his feet toward the knee-knocker cabinet he makes their tea from.

"I have these." He opens a drawer, the wood creaking with wear, and pulls out a box. With intrigue, she sits straighter, cranes her neck to take a closer look at the trinket. He opens the lid and pulls out a veil, and with it, a curved dagger, the sheath blue with gold at the helm.

He sets the box on the cabinet top then comes to sit next to her, opens his hands so she can take a better look. The veil is red, with gold lining, and the knife, old.

"I told you I was young when I lost her." He explains, "What I didn't tell you is that I don't remember how." He rolls the items over in his hands, as if the feel would trigger a memory. "But these belonged to my parents."

He hands her the dagger, and the weight is cold, heavy in her palm. It's worn, the blue of its sheath chipped from wear, and on its hilt is a sphere, etched with designs she's seen west of Egypt. It's new and yet familiar at the same time.

Then she picks up the shroud, runs the sheer threads under her fingers, watches as the sunlight gleams off the gold stitching and she recognizes the oriental design from years of training. She knows, from being stuffed into silks and linens, that this is from Asia-minor.

And it came to one of two places; the palace, or the brothels.

"Aladdin, this fabric-

"Is imported from the East." He finishes "Yeah, I know."

"Was your mother-

"I don't know." He tells her, and when she looks up at him, his stare is on her bodice, "I don't know who she was." He says, "I don't know if I want to."

For years he must have considered the implication, being born of recklessness; just the creation of some lewd act twenty years ago, and it sinks her heart. This is why he doesn't ponder his beginnings, and still lost in himself, he plays with the fringe at her abdomen, picking at the silver threads as if they held his past.

"And if she died…" he says, his voice hushed, "then I'd understand why she left me. My father too, but if they didn't…" He stops, swallows, and as she watches his eyes water, she feels a hollow under her rib cage, his agony sunk below her skin.

He's already convinced himself he was a mistake.

And it's her cat now, that comes to comfort him, rubbing his head under Aladdin's chin, and he pets the tiger back; a friendship borne of his character.

"They wouldn't abandon you." She tells him, but his smile is curt, disparaging.

"But what if they did?"

He's so raw, so fragilely innocent in this moment, that the ache is rapping through her whole body, pulling her breath to the place his childhood was lost.

"Aladdin-

"It doesn't matter know." He tells her, but she watches his face contort in faraway pain.

"Don't you want to know?"

For a minute, he's silent, then tells her. "No." he drops his hand from her middle. "I don't need to know why they didn't want me."

"Aladdin-

"Jasmine, I don't need to know."

He takes the veil from her, the dagger, then plays with her hand between both of his, and she feels the electricity rush to her fingertips, her toes.

"All I need is right here."

His beautiful face lights up again, when he looks at her, his eyes a russet glimmer of happiness, and hope.

"I don't need to know my past." He whispers, "Because my future is right here."

He presses his forehead to hers, his breath a hot flush on her face as he brings his hands to her neck.

"I only need you."

Her lips curve, as her hands run up his forearms to his wrists, and his mouth is so close to hers, she can almost taste the sweetness. And now that heat, that glorious warmth in her core aches between her legs, and she's way too impatient to feed her desire. Her breath is heavy when she says;

"Then have me."

He raises a brow, grins, and his eyes darken under heavy lashes; an opaque of the same desire nabbing at her every nerve-end.

"Is that a command, your highness?"

"Yes."


	2. Chapter 2

For an Arabian afternoon, it's exceptionally hot; the kind of exceptional that comes with a sun so angry it scorches every down hair on your body.

To him however, it's a pleasant burn, calming in the same way it's been since he was a child; sitting on the same roofs of the city, watching the hustle and bustle of the marketplace, scoping out his next victim, his next pawn of something stolen to put food in his belly.

Ashamed, he grits his teeth, shields his eyes. He breathes in deep the smell of sea salt, hot bread and myrrh, the indistinguishable scent of the port city he's wronged since childhood.

He doesn't know how if there's truly a recompense for all the things he used to do. He'll never be able to pay enough moral restitution to the person he is now; the person she's made him.

But she tells him he doesn't have to.

_I understood why you did it,_ she's told him_. I couldn't imagine having to fend for myself since such a young age_. In the way she always does, she'd responded with empathy to the person he used to be_. It's not my place to judge you for how you survived before me, she's told him, I know you would have chosen any other way if you could have._

Only seven weeks and already she's absolved him of his past, comprehended his character in ways he didn't think another human being could.

In the same way she grasps why he's still a little uncomfortable, a little awkward when they pass through these streets in royal clothes, making conversation in the name of democratic hope and generosity, with the same merchants he's thieved since before he can remember.

_They love you,_ she tells him, _they're getting to know you like I do._

He's been trying to come to terms with her truth, believe her when she says he'll get used to being adored as much as he was scorned.

She told him, weeks ago, that he was a prince without riches and still, he feels the only thing that makes him truly wealthy is how she sees him. And she grants him strength, when she's lying on his arm, when he brushes a strand of raven hair from her face. She's so amazingly delicate and fierce at the same time; a flower, a wild animal, a feral spirit uncaged and free.

It's why he tries harder to impress, to feel in himself the kind of confidence she sees in him when they're in the throne room, the courtyard, or even the marketplace.

For her, he'll be everything and slowly, he's starting to feel just a little more at ease with his circumstance.

But sometimes staring into faces he's aggrieved is still a little too much, so when he tells her he needs minutes like this, to himself, to center again the courage to co-rule a kingdom, she allows it to him.

So, he climbed up here, to the top of this spice shop; a perch he's known since young adulthood. Amidst his newfound sovereignty, he finds liberation in the swift of his feet, the ascent of a building; an exercise bringing freedom from a too careful study, a too silent judgement of all the things he's expected to be; all the things he's promised her he'll amount to as long as she loves him.

She makes him feel like he can do anything.

"What's up boy?"

Still squinting from the sun, Aladdin cracks a smile at the voice, turns, and when he looks up at his friend, he notices he's bared from the waist up, some type of dark visor across his eyes.

Even human, Genie still displays new and future concepts learned from ancient magic, technologies he utilizes when convenience outweighs pragmatism. Like the tiny sundial he wears on his wrist and calls a time watch, the circular dial and tiny knives he attached to the bottom of a vase and called a blender, and now this new optical protection Aladdin doesn't yet know the name of.

Like he doesn't know the name Genie wants to go by these days. Some days it's Habbi, some days Mustafa, others, Gene. Depends on the day, depends on the crowd_. I ain't the Prince Consort_, he's told him, spread onto the chaise on the palace verandah, _I'mma be_ _whoever I want on any given day, you know why? Cause I'm human now, and I can. Plus, adds to the role play if you know what I'm sayin'._

He'll always be Genie to him.

"Hey." Aladdin responds, as his friend takes his place beside him.

He watches as Genie pulls out a familiar vial, drips the carrot and coconut oils into his palm, before spreading onto his already dark chest, arms and face. This is what Genie calls tanning lotion, and 'getting his bake on', a new practice the females of the palace have embraced with eager willingness.

Aladdin doesn't get it.

"Wooo, it's hot as Sham's armpit today." Genie says to him, moving himself down to lay on the roof, and Aladdin doesn't think he's ever heard the Goddess, or the sun, compared in such a way.

He wonders, not for the first time, what social culture can become so desensitized, that Genies' rhetoric becomes standard.

"Don't mind my interruptin' your personal pity party." Genie continues, and Aladdin shifts, the words making him uncomfortable.

"How did you-

"It wasn't just cosmic powers that made me all knowing." He states. "Some things I can deduce on my own and you, my man, are still havin' issues being a real prince with all the real prince…" he watches his friend struggle for the next word before he throws his hands in the air and finishes. ".. stuff. That's why you're up here, and she's down there, and I told you before you ain't got time for that."

It rubs him the wrong way, how the words replay, so he distracts himself by focusing on the sight below him.

As she always is, she's beautiful, dressed in orange and gold, with the sunlight glinting off her jade headpiece, her sun-bronzed skin, and as she moves among the people, getting to know them, invigorating them, he's reminded again just how perfect a Sultana she is.

"I've never seen her so happy as she is down there, among her people." He says, his words the tail end of his thoughts. "They tell her she reminds them of her mother."

It grows eerily quiet, after he says it, and there's something both tense and reverential in the air at the mention of the once queen. He braces his back against it.

"You ugh…hear 'bout what happened?"

After Genie's asked it, he props himself on his elbows and Aladdin licks his dry lips, feels a nab at his ribcage in the remembrance of the sad story she'd told him weeks earlier.

"Yeah, she told me."

"They say the Duke was a really bad dude." Genie responds. "Story goes he passed out over his wine and figs, never woke up."

"He was poisoned?"

"Not officially, but yeah, by our friendly neighborhood Royal Vizier."

"Jafar?"

Genie nods.

"Word is he was just an officer at the time, makin' his way." He stares into the distance, focusing on nothing. "Turns out the Apothecary who aided the Duke in death spent some time in the same Sherabot jail as our public enemy number one. Owed him a favor, I guess. Said officially, the Duke died of over-indulgence."

Aladdin turns this news over, recollects something said to him once.

Steal a country, and you're a statesman.

"So what happens when you silently take out a Sultan's arch nemesis?" Genie asks, as if he's read his mind.

"You get a promotion."

"That's right. Wore that ugly-ass turban ever since." Genie sounds self-satisfied when he says next "Until we demoted his ass to ten thousand years in that brass prison."

"What happened to the assassin?"

"Taken out by the guy before Jafar." Genie moves, and his whole-body glints in the sunlight. "Sounds like he got himself killed in the process."

These are the tales told in the halls, told from the servants, told from the men down in the docks where Genie learns to build the boat he'll call his home. He goes by Hassim down there, and in the palace.

Minutes pass in comfortable silence before Aladdin asks;

"How's the boat going?"

In all their adventures outside the palace, they've only visited Genie at his day job once or twice.

"It's going, takes alota time you know." Genie sounds almost disheartened "It's a lot of wood and carvin'. Lotta paint."

He's picking at what Aladdin thinks as an invisible splinter in his finger pad. It would be so much easier, if he could snap his fingers and make it appear. He's impatient for his next chapter.

"Wishing you made it when you still had magic?"

"A little bit."

They both chuckle at this.

"Nah." He says in all seriousness. "Feel's nice to make something organic from my hands."

It must be something, to have never known the need to labor. To create, yes, but to toil a creation till you've calloused your hands, that's triumph.

"How's it goin' with you guys?"

Genie asks this, and the question makes him look again, to the bazar below. She's inspecting some brightly colored fabric and conversing with the merchant before her handmaid leans in, and they laugh together, in the way they've taken to now when her and Dalia have something secret to say to each other. Then they look up, wave; must have been about them.

He waves back before answering;

"She's still the most perfect thing I ever touched."


	3. Chapter 3

If there was ever a room where neglected things go, it was the gallery in the left wing of the palace.

It's stuffy, packed with trinkets, gifts from princes that wanted her hand, like the opera scopes from France, the trunks of fans from Japan and the elephant horns from Africa; tokens to win an empire.

It isn't dirty, but the air isn't clean either, it's thick with the dust of old paper, old smoking leaves and inattention. She waves from in front of her face, tiny particles in the sun, coughs when it catches in her throat.

They really should have cleaned in here more often.

"So where do you think it is?"

The words are almost sing-songy, and Jasmine tip-toes around a hookah, stays clear of a bronze leopard statue, and dodges a ceramic urn she thinks she got at fifteen from a South-African chief who called her Mawu.

"I'll let you know when I see it."

After she'd died, all the things her mother collected were packed up in here, her father unwilling to bear anymore the constant reminder of what he'd lost. Her mother's armlet however she'd kept, worn on her wrist since she was thirteen, a reminder of where she came from; of a mother's faith in her daughter.

And that gold and turquoise bracelet is why she's in here now.

Her father owned a ring that matched, a bought pair from an excursion in her early years to her mother's kingdom, a pair of trinkets signifying a remembrance of homeland, of roots, of who you are after the pomp and glory are stripped away; a bare-naked soul of strength, courage or restraint.

She chose not to be the latter. And neither did Aladdin.

That's why she's giving him the ring, as a wedding present, to encourage his self-fight, to help him understand it's his strong soul that makes him wonderful, deserving; a spectacle of silent greatness in her world of mundane things.

Her personified mother's bracelet.

And she remembers her father had a desk he'd loved once, and she's pretty sure it's in here, a black and red oriental masterpiece that once graced the foot of her parent's bed. It'd been a gift from the Chinese empire, and she remembers trifling through it, as a little girl, inside a gold locket, a jeweled rose, sentimental curios her parents exchanged in the moments when a soul's constraint was too overwhelming for courage to extinguish.

As if by will, she spots it, in the corner of the room, shadowed by the dusty beams of sunlight, and she feels her heart race on the excitement.

"It's over here."

She reports, and hears Dalia behind her, the clang of her friend climbing over luggage and furniture. If her friend was anything, it was inherently dramatic in every aspect of her life.

She opens the top drawer, as Dalia complains of the dust, runs her hands over old papers, stale pipe tobacco, an old compass her father told her he'd won from an ale merchant in Tortuga. Then she spots it, a velvet box, and clutches up the carton before closing the drawer.

"Let me see."

Begs her friend, and she plucks it out of Jasmine's hand. Not only was she bold, she was also an impatiently curious spirit.

Even in the shadows the ring shines, but Dalia brings it into the sunlight. It's how Jasmine remembers, a heavy jade stone atop a turquoise and gold band, and as Dalia expresses her awe in expletives, Jasmine laughs.

"You've had this hiding away in here this whole time?"

Cheekily, Jasmine grabs the box, and before she can respond, her handmaid asks;

"What else is here?"

She starts rifling through the crates atop of the desk, the trunks to the side of it; an impressively dressed pirate excited from the mystery of a treasure-find.

"If you want to spend all day in here, you're welcome to."

She tells her, and laughs.

She was thirteen when Dalia came to stay, her father, a silk vendor and goat farmer; a family business that brought him to the palace and them together as childhood friends. In all her years of captivity, this loud comrade, with her bold personality and curt humor, had been her only respite in a gilded cage.

She'll never be able to truly thank her for it.

Nothing material she could give now compares to Dalia's new future; a once-Genie, a man to love her in the same liberated way she loves; a handmaid captured by the most ancient magic.

And so now there's no routine anymore in their time together, just treasured hours in the months before her friend will leave for the sea, on a freshly made boat with her soon- to- be- husband.

When Hassim's down at the dock, this is how they spend their time, careless, daring, mutual friends finding tiny adventures amid planning a wedding, running a kingdom.

"You can have anything you'd like."

She says, as Dalia's digging through a large trunk, one foot inside of it, and suddenly her face lights up in a wide smile.

"I don't know if I-" She spots something. "Yes. I can accept that."

She pulls out a dress, and before Jasmine can respond, her breathe hitches at the sight.

At the bodice and sleeves is the same material as the veil she'd held earlier, red and gold with fine etching, and she doesn't understand, because she doesn't know where this dress came from. She'd gone through her mother's wardrobe at seven years old, laid in the pile of clothes till her tears dried to her cheeks, but this she doesn't remember.

"Was this your mother's? It's beautiful."

Dalia asks, sashaying the costume in front of her, and Jasmine starts to feel the shock, the prickling suspense of something unknown span from the end of her breath to her fingertips, and she rubs it into her palms.

"No."

She responds, quietly, then;

"What else is in that trunk?"

She moves closer as Dalia takes a better inspection. There's colorful fabrics, other dresses and shawls of blues and greens Jasmine doesn't recognize, a simple silver bangle, and an old book of lullabies. None of this is familiar.

"I don't know where all this came from."

Jasmine states as she picks up the bracelet, runs her fingers over its cool seamlessness.

"None of it?" questions her friend and still trying to muddle through the confusion, Jasmine shakes her head.

Then she eyes the dress again, it truly is beautiful, a white body, with the red and gold lace flowing from the bodice, from the shoulders and that prickling feeling rushes to her toes.

"But I've seen this fabric before." She says, and when Dalia questions, Jasmine tells her of the day in his hovel, of what he'd showed her, and what he'd said.

"I'm sure many things could have been made with this lace." Dalia states, in a means to comfort. "Maybe it's just a coincidence."

"Maybe." Jasmine responds, "But why don't I recognize these things?" She presses the jewelry into her palm, as if the pressure could summon a memory. "I know the story behind everything in this room." She motions toward the trunk. "Except this."

The two stare, motionless at the large case, the air thick with mystery, the quiet, deafening from the unknown of it. It creeps up Jasmine's spine.

"Well." Dalia says, breaking the silence. "Maybe your father would know."

In the middle of all the uncertainty, this was an avenue she'd already considered.

"Maybe." Jasmine responds, quietly.

Then she hears Dalia sigh, watches as her face drops in a sudden sadness.

"I guess I'm not getting this dress." She hands it to Jasmine. "Maybe there's a nice sconce in here somewhere."


	4. Chapter 4

Since she's taken the throne, her father has relished in his free time. As King father, he's considered the idea of an extended holiday, a trip to truly enjoy his retirement before his daughter's marriage.

After her coronation he started circling destinations on the maps spread across his desk; cities like London, Paris, and the Swiss colonies, never being able to decide what climate he preferred to vacation in.

And when she comes to find him, in his study among his world of bronze statues and paintings, he's poured over the papers with his ink quill, the end of it against his lips.

As a girl, she'd spend time with him in here, his brow furrowed with the same attention he has now; then the decisions of a sultanate on his shoulders; an invisible supremacy that filled the air with anticipation and power.

There's no weight of it here any longer.

It follows her now.

There's just an unburdened old man, looking forward to his time of rest.

It makes her happy to see him this way.

"Babba?" She asks, the dress draped over arm, "Babba do you have a minute?"

"For you my daughter," he looks up, opens a hand to her. "I have all the time. Come."

He motions for her to near, and when she smiles at him, he comments on his project.

"I still cannot decide where I want to take my trip." He shuffles the papers "I never knew how much time one could dedicate to such a venture."

She clutches the fabric in her fingers, as she comes to stand at his side, willing through the sheer threads that he has memory of where this came from.

She'd tucked the ring away, safely into her vanity, before coming here, all the while her mind racing at the possibilities of this discovery, her curiosity convincing her to research, study, to decipher logically, the jarring implications of this coincidence.

"Babba, I have something to ask you."

At the end of her words, he faces her, opens his palms to the air.

"What is it my child?"

She holds up the dress, and instantly, his face lights up, the skin pulls taunt from his smile, before he brings his hand to cover it.

"You've found a dress for your wedding ceremony?"

When his eyes begin to gleam, she realizes he's misread her intention.

Since Aladdin, since the announcement of their engagement and her coronation, he's been easily excitable like his, his emotion worn on his sleeve in a way she's never seen before; a father overwhelmed with love, with pride; with the happiness of knowing the future of his house.

She reaches out to touch his arm, in an ease of understanding.

"No Babba," She says, "I found this dress, upstairs in the gallery."

She watches; in his eyes a sheen of instant panic; the door to a ghost he shut out years ago, then as soon as it came, it's gone, replaced with a liquid-brown acceptance, of the past, of where they are, of how far they've come.

"Was this your mother's?"

He asks, as she stretches the threads between her hands.

"I don't think so." She responds, "I found it in a trunk, with a bracelet and a book. I didn't recognize any of it."

This eases him, back to the place he was before, and she kneels to his eye level.

"Babba, I need you to think." She tells him. "Is this dress familiar at all? If this isn't mothers, do you know where it could have come from?"

Slowly he reaches out, and she watches his fingers, rigid with age, drag across the fabric. She sees his stare grow distant under a furrowed brow, his mind trying to conjure a memory so he can help her.

He drops his hand, the cause lost.

"I'm sorry Jasmine." He looks up at her. "I have no memory of this."

There's a sinking feeling in her gut at the end of his words; a gravitational pull from the bottom of her sternum to the place where futility goes.

"However." He says, and his index finger shoots up, weighted under the knuckle by a ruby ring, "After your mother died, I had everything from her quarters taken to that room. I didn't spare time or organization."

He pauses then,

"Perhaps it belonged to one of her handmaids."

This is a new avenue, and a brimming excitement forms under Jasmines skin; an enthusiastic impatience that forms the small curve of her mouth.

Culture permits a queen many consorts, a maid servant for every purpose but she doesn't remember their names, or faces, they're blurred in the memory of a child who spent her days with a tutor in the palace _madrasah_.

But she knows how she can find out.

"'She had so many in those years." He continues. "Though I regret that I did not spend the time I should have learning of your mother's harem."

It's remorse she watches pass through her father's brow; a husband guilted by too much unknown of his wife's world.

"I was too occupied with my own state of affairs."

His face softens in sadness, before he buries the self-blame, then she watches a new thought capture his features; his eyes sparkling with recollection. He grabs her hands.

"Though your mother did have a favorite." He seems overjoyed to have found the memory. "It was her chambermaid. She found her disposition profound for a servant. They spent a lot of time together. Much like you and Dalia."

"What was her name?"

Jasmine asks, but he frowns.

"It was so long ago, Jasmine." He squeezes her hands in apology.

"It's okay, Babba." She kisses his knuckles. "Thank you."

She moves a hand to his cheek in gratitude, and his eyes shine again; a watery capture of the love he has for his daughter.

She moves to get up, leave, and hears behind her;

"You can find an account-

"In the palace records in the library." She finishes, "I know, Babba." She turns back. "I am Sultan."


	5. Chapter 5

However small, his parents' things were the only inheritance from a childhood he doesn't remember.

After their venture to the marketplace he brought them back here to the palace, buried them in a gold-leaf chest his future-father-in-law gave him as a wedding gift.

_This is for you, my son_, he'd told him, his arms unraveling the trunk, _it was given to me by my father on the day I became Sultan._ He'd ran his fingers over the gold-etching, the written inscription, _khudh hadharah litaerif ma tatrukh li'atfalik_; Take mind to know what you leave your children.

Instantly he knew what it meant, grasped the concept in a way that was to painstakingly familiar.

Nothing meaningful you can give your children, will ever fit in a box.

And yet all he had of his parentage were objects. There were no life lessons, no character traits, no personality quirks he could blame on one parent or the other, just things, tokens he doesn't even know the history behind.

His birthright is a blank slate.

He was cheated, he thinks, as he sits here on her chaise, in their room, moving her hand mirror in the air to watch the sun bounce off it.

He's logical enough to deduce the facts, the origin of the veil's fabric or the Egyptian language etched into the knife, but the rest he'd spent years imagining, creating pictures in his head to explain where he came from, and why they left.

After a while, they stopped, replaced with darkness, emptiness, the loneliness of deciding he wasn't wanted; that his mother was a prostitute and his father, a vagabond.

There's a song, versus to a lullaby in his head he knows his mother sang to him. In the fuzzy haze of a too-young memory, he knows the words, the tune, her voice.

But even a melody can't make motherhood appealing.

His legacy was an accident.

Like a crust of bread thrown to dogs; he was thrown away at five years old.

He stopped imagining anything else.

He watches as colors cast on the ceiling, a retraction pulled from the mirror in his hand, a pink and white reflection grasping for a flat plane to call home.

Everything wants to belong.

He doesn't need the verification of his parentage. To solidify his impetuous beginning, would be to pass down a history of the unworthiness he's already trying not to feel. He'd rather not know, can still pretend when he has to, that maybe he came from honorable condition.

It's why he told her, in his hovel in the city, that he doesn't want to know, doesn't want to threaten the fulcrum of his newly designed self-confidence by dredging up what could be Agrabah's most shameful history.

He doesn't need to taint the name of her house; their reputation, their future progeny.

When she came, he felt the darkness and loneliness creep away, replaced instead with a belief that maybe he did have the right to father children of his own, to even ask for it; to be the kind of parent he never got to have.

He can do that better pretending he deserves it.

She tells him that there's nothing he doesn't have the right to expect.

What he can give his children won't fit in a box.

He hears the door open, feels her enter the room and shuffle around, but he doesn't turn.

"I was thinking maybe we should put a mirrored ceiling in the front-"

The look on her face when he does stops him. It's both panic and surprise written on her beautiful face and he feels his body start to tense in response.

"What's wrong?"

On his question, she tucks a hair behind her ear, her bracelets jingling with the movement. If he didn't know any better, he'd say she seemed almost seized, caught under his presence.

"Nothing's wrong."

She says and he sees her force a smile.

"Then why do you have that look on your face?"

In response he can tell she's fixing her expression, her brows and eyes narrowed from before. He hasn't seen her act this odd.

"I don't have a look." She says, "I think you're seeing things."

He doesn't buy it but doesn't know what to say next when she comes to him, kisses his cheek before plucking the mirror from his hand.

"You're not allowed to have this remember?"

A week ago, Genie convinced Abu to see how far they could signal each other with mirrors from across the palace grounds. In the backlash of what Jasmine called nonsensical male impulsiveness, it was decided that he too should be punished when a mirror got broken. Afterall it was his monkey.

He didn't think she meant it.

"I thought you were joking." he says, feeling insulted.

"I'm a Sultan." She says, putting it back on her vanity, "I don't joke."

She seems more straightforward, a little more brass then he'd like, and he doesn't like the way it's making him feel small. He purses his lips, considers taking to pouting.

"But I do like to laugh. That's why I have you."

He hears her say it and instantly his mood shifts, he turns to her and her eyes are sparkling, an umber humor of apology because she came off as short to him.

He couldn't love her more.

"I have a meeting." She tells him. "Try not to break anything."


	6. Chapter 6

It's past dusk when she finally makes it to the library.

Duty pulled her from her much earlier mission, demanded her presence in the great hall at the news of a ship fire, a quarrel, the dye makers demanding a personal tax for stains in their hands that will never wash out.

And in the frenzy, she envied a commonplace life. Only for a moment.

When she enters, she's surprised again to find him, on the floor this time buried in a pile of books. The dim light of the oil lamp drags his shadow across the room; against the wall; an elongated silhouette carried to the doorway.

Even his shadow pulls to her.

She recognizes from their covers the books are of science, industry, the kind of engineering he'd learned from years on his own; contraptions created from his beautiful mind. She'd seen it that first day, when they'd been chased in the marketplace, the way he'd used ropes, leverage and pullies to gain the high ground.

This is his way of expanding his skillset.

And she's not sure how to approach; the intent of her task raising questions from him, again. She hasn't yet decided if she wants to make something of the dress; or her curiosity but apparently, she wants to make something of concealing them.

"You're doing that thing again where you quietly admire me from across the room."

The words are soft, reverberate through the walls, her bones. She smiles.

"Can you blame me?"

When he looks at her, the thin lamplight shades the planes of his face, those dimples, lights his eyes in something playful; a dark glint of humor.

"I'd have to say no."

His beautiful smile widens when he shifts to sit with his legs crossed, all his attention on her now and she realizes he's barefoot.

Weeks ago, he wouldn't dare be so relaxed. He's starting to feel comfortable in this place, in his clothes; as a prince.

Slowly, he's starting to believe in himself.

And the thought makes her feel, suddenly, guilty.

It's been hours since they found the dress, since she went to their room, since impulsively, she'd kicked it under their bed when she saw him on the chaise, not sure how to tell him that it may be a coincidence, or it may be not. He'd told her his origins didn't matter, that he'd preferred the ignorance, but she'd be remiss if she had the chance to know and didn't take it.

Everything he's given her, she owed this to him.

And yet there's still a nagging feeling, a whisper under her skin that made her hide the dress, a fear of consequence that begs she keep this a secret, for now, until she knows for sure, if at all, this connects to him.

Afterall she's practical, not ridiculous.

"Are you okay?"

He asks her, and she realizes she'd been staring at her hands.

"Yeah I um..." She searches, and desperate for an excuse, walks to the bookcase; pulls the first book she can find. "I came for this."

"What is it?"

She didn't expect the question, feels her body heat under the weight of his query. She looks down at the cover and realizes, instantly, she should have paid attention to the title.

He's already been to this bookcase.

"The Kama Sutra."

Dammit.

There's a shit-eating grin on his face, as she feels her whole-body blush, needles, rushing to her fingertips under the muse of his observation.

"Are you trying to tell me something?"

he asks, and recomposed, she shoots him down.

"Don't get excited." She says, "It's for Dalia."

It sounds reasonable enough, given they have to avoid the south corridor when her handmaid and lover are both in the palace.

The echoes of their moans and movements will be forever etched into the halls.

And her memory.

His too judging by the way his nose is smooshed up, a look of repulsion playing so swiftly across his beautiful features that at any other time, she would laugh at it.

"Are you sure that's a good idea?" He's wearing a stare so serious; she wants to hit him with the book. "I had nightmares for days last time."

"You did not." She responds, and he shrugs, still toying with her.

"We shouldn't have to be subjected to such preposterousness on our way to breakfast." He puts a hand on his chest. "It made me lose my appetite."

"Preposterousness?" she questions the uncharacteristic remark with a grin, "I think you need to stop reading."

"They can't keep that shit quiet. That's all I'm saying."

He gets like this, animated when he's trying to both prove a point, and bring out her playful side. If she wasn't slightly irritated, she might find him damn cute.

"They're enjoying each other."

She responds, feeding into him.

"We enjoy each other." He throws his arms in the air, and the shadow ascends above his head. "We don't involve the whole palace."

She knows how to end this.

"Maybe we should."

As she expected he stops his act, looks at her with such shock, she has to swallow the hilarity of it.

"Wait, what?"

"Goodnight."

Is her only response as she turns on her heels, and she can feel his caught-off-guardedness trail behind her, a judder of his surprise crawl up her back.

"If you mean that." She hears him holler, as she lets herself breathe. "Come back and find me."


	7. Chapter 7

"You told him what?"

From behind her, she hears in Dalia's voice a cynical reaction, an unappreciative reply to her tale of last night.

"I had to make up something." Jasmine responds, as the two make their way to the library. "It was the most believable excuse."

This morning, she'd suggested to Aladdin he spend time with Hassim on the boat, a ploy to get him out of the palace so she could continue her quest without questions. He'd asked her again, when he'd come to bed, why she'd been in the library, and she did her best to convince him her cause had been stated.

She'd silenced him then, by turning over to sleep.

"I don't understand why you can't just tell him the truth."

Dalia states, as Jasmine pushes open the door, the force a smell of aged books and hot air.

"Because he doesn't have any interest in finding out who his parents were."

She heads to the corner of the room, passes an oak table, a replica sarcophagus from Egypt and hears Dalia sigh behind her. She feels a pressure on her shoulders, and instantly, her friend's whipped her around with her arms.

"Then I think you need to respect his wishes. This isn't going to end well if you're lying to him." Her look is stern, a pretty set of dark eyes seriously concerned above a thinly hooked nose.

As always, Dalia is apprehensive toward an outcome that could cause Jasmine's unhappiness, and again, she feels a twinge of appreciation for having such a friend.

"I'm not lying to him. I'm-" She searches for the word as she looks toward the ceiling. "I'm withholding."

Satisfied with the excuse, she puts her arms on Dalia's shoulders.

"You don't have to be concerned for me. I've got this handled."

She watches the handmaid's face set, in disbelief, in aggravation, before she puts her arms atop hers, pulls them off.

"I'm not concerned for you. I'm concerned for me."

This makes Jasmine frown, that earlier twinge replaced with annoyance.

"How?"

"If you play this out, and then you tell him, and he can't forgive you for it." She points her finger. "He could leave and Hassim could go with him. And there goes my ship, and my two children."

She can't help feeling irritated by Dalia's ridiculous conclusion. Of all the things that could come from this, that would be the last thing to ever happen. Ever.

She's heard, unavoidably, how much he loves her in every position possible.

Again, Dalia's chosen to be overly dramatic.

"That isn't going to happen." She replies. "Hassim loves you. You worry too much."

She turns again, to get back to her task, before she hears;

"You'd better hope Aladdin is the same, or we are planning your wedding for nothing."

She chooses to ignore this last statement, as she lifts the lid to her destination. All the palace records are kept in this chest. She remembers as a girl, she'd watch Akbar, the palace recorder, put all the books back after he'd inked his monthly updates.

All her time memorizing the books in this room, these she never took mind to the last ten years.

There were always more interesting worlds then her own.

"Help me with these." She demands, as she pushes books into Dalia's hands. "We're looking for anything about female servants."

"I thought you said I wasn't a servant."

Oh Allah, they don't have time for this. She should have just said handmaids.

"You're not."

"You told me the dress might have belonged to a handmaid." Dalia says, as she sets the books onto the floor. "As of now, I'm still your handmaid. You're implying I'm a female servant."

Growing more aggravated, she sighs. Being she choose at a young age to stay in the palace, Dalia's always found the thought of servitude insulting. She wasn't bought, she offered her own services in exchange for living in a castle.

Jasmine's heard the harangue a million times.

She forgets how often her friend can overreact.

"You're not a servant. You're free to come and go as you please and..." She hikes more books out of the chest. "You're my friend."

"You pay me like a servant."

"I employ you. There's a difference." She stops what she's doing, stares at her friend who, by the look on her face, is skidding the line from offended to sad. "I promise, I don't think of you as a servant." She reaches out to touch the top of her arm. "You're my overly dramatic best friend."

After a moment of skepticism, Dalia seems satisfied with this, her face breaking out in a short smile.

"Good. Now how far back to you want to go with these?"


	8. Chapter 8

The handmaid's name was Zena.

After hours pouring over the records, they'd discovered names, the stations of her mother's servants, reports of times spent in trips abroad, and special parties. It wasn't until Dalia had found the scrolls, tucked in the bottom of Akbar's chest, that she came to know the truth she does now.

They were painted pictures, ones like those commissioned by her father every time the French Envoy and his party were entertained at the palace. She learned at a young age that the French are always generous with selling their art; anything for a profit.

The paintings were of her mother's world; her mother's garden, rajah as a cub, her mother at her vanity, and as Jasmine had felt the emotion, the sudden wish to live again through those pictures, the next portrait she unrolled gave them their answer.

It was of her mother and her chambermaid, the two laughing, both with dark hair and smiling faces, but it had been the veil, the same veil he'd showed her days ago, that'd made her breathe stop.

It was worn by the handmaiden; the women with his eyes, and his smile.

And she'd been wearing the dress.

Astounded, she'd been weighted to the floor, her mind unable to fully comprehend what it could mean if that women, that beautiful laughing spirit who knew these walls, who was her _Mama's_ best friend, could be his mother. Subconsciously, she'd entertained the theory, but it hadn't felt real, possible, logical. It was just the far-reaching idea of an inquiring mind.

The concept came alive the moment she saw the painting.

It'd exhilarated and terrified her at the same time, a duel-anesthesia that had sped through her veins so fiercely, it caught in her sternum.

And she'd inhaled deep, steadied her racing pulse before telling Dalia she knew how to get the rest of her answers.

She'd thought about it hours ago.

"We're going to need to take a trip."

She'd told her, and that's why she's here now, in her studio, packing into her satchel the painting, and the box she knew he'd hid in the chest from her father.

She knows it's risky, to test his trust by borrowing his things, but she tries not to contemplate the consequences.

It'll be easier, avoiding the feeling. She needs to have the objects on-hand.

"Are you ready, Rajah?"

In the corner of the room is her tiger, and she holds out her hand, bids him to come.

They're going to see her old_ Shaykha_.

As a girl she'd called her tutor mama Phrata, a portly woman with close-set eyes and a soothing voice. She'd been both Jasmine's teacher and ally for seventeen years, telling her always, she can do anything she sets her mind to. Because of mama Phrata, she'd had the courage to be a Sultan.

If anyone can remember Zena, it was her.

"There you are." She hears his voice and her heart stops. "I've been looking for you."

She looks up to see him when he enters the room, and as she forces a smile, the pull aches her cheeks.

He seems wary, but pleased to see her, the labor at the shipyard having stained his clothes with paint and wood-sand.

There's one dimple deeper than the other from his one-sided grin, and she's eased that he seems clueless toward the stolen heirlooms burning a hole through her bag, her hip.

He wasn't supposed to be back for a while. He points his thumb to the hall.

"Amat said you were in the library all day?"

If anyone ever knew anything, it was the once-bodyguard she'd permanently stationed outside her study. His only job was to monitor entry.

Like this one.

"I was. I was um-doing stuff." she says, then quickly to change the subject; "You're back early."

She hates that even to herself; she seems panicky, aloof, obviously impatient.

"Yeah." There's the full smile. "I was hoping maybe we could-

he stops when he realizes her condition, and she bites her lip on it.

"Are you going somewhere?"

"I-"

She's caught, by the beautifully innocent look on his face, his eyes a brown search for understanding, and she feels that constant nagging back under her ribcage.

But she needs to know.

"I have business." She searches her words "For reasons."

She finishes and cringes, because it's a shitty excuse and she knows he won't buy it, but if she get's out of here fast enough, she won't have to answer.

"What reasons?"

She zips past him, and as she expects Rajah to follow her, he doesn't. He stops at her fiancé.

Traitor.

"Rajah, come."

She says, trying like hell to avoid Aladdin's eyes, his questioning expression.

"Are you gonna tell me where you're going?"

"I'm going out."

Is all she says, and she hears him sigh, fighting with whether to argue or resign at her silence. The cat finally comes to her.

"When will you be back?"

"I don't know." She tells him, petting the tiger. "But don't wait up."

And on this, she escapes to find Dalia, exhales a breath so deep she starts to feel lightheaded.

Maybe not telling him, really is a mistake.


	9. Chapter 9

"I think something's going on with Jasmine."

He doesn't like the way the words taste, doesn't like the aching feeling in his chest when he says it.

This morning she'd told him to come here, to the shipyard, suggested for the first time he spend a morning away from her. It wouldn't be so suspect if she hadn't spent the last two days acting weird around him; acting surprised, apprehensive.

And the last time he saw her didn't ease any of his worry, made it worse by the sheer obviousness that she didn't want to talk to him.

Or be around him.

He picks a wood strand off the crate he's sitting on, continues to shred it through his fingers as he watches Genie chisel the end of a board.

"She's the Sultan." His friend responds, "Doesn't she always have something going on?"

Genie hikes the timber onto his shoulder, makes his way to the other side of the skeletal hull. He wears a turban now, a multi-color headdress to shade the dark tufts of hair he's grown out.

He seems more at ease here than he ever was outside the lamp.

If he wasn't so involved in his own psychological misery, he'd tell him so.

"No, I mean," he picks another wood shred, "She's acting weird. Almost like she's hiding something from me."

This makes Genie turn to him, rub his hands together to clean his palms of wood dust. He can tell, by the way his friends eyes soften, the way his brows turn up, that he understands the depth of this conversation.

He sits on the pile of loose boards.

"What do you think it is?"

"I don't know." Aladdin squints one eye on the sun. "but I don't like how it's making me feel."

He'd spent so many weeks, reinforcing inside himself that because she'd loved him, he'd had a future worth something. With the way she's acting, with that look in her eyes; that brown and amber distant attraction, murmuring of secrets and disinterest, he's starting to feel maybe she's tired of him.

He'd mulled the thought over last night, after she'd turned over in bed. She always lets him hold her to sleep.

He never once considered before there could be an alternative.

"I asked her where she was going tonight, and she wouldn't even tell me."

He says, turning over the Agate ring on his index finger, the one she gave him in week two to dignify his position; his name.

"Maybe it's a surprise."

Genie suggests, but he knows it's not true.

"If it was a surprise, she'd tell me it was a surprise."

"Unless she's surprising you with a surprise."

Aladdin knows he's trying to help, but that scratched the surface of his irritation.

It must have been on his face because Genie says next;

"You're right." And fans his finger out, "That's too much."

There's a ship bell in the distance, a captain's call, the sounds of hammers and sea gulls. He watches one land on the top of Genie's unfinished mast.

Anything to distract his mind.

"Have you talked to her about it?"

The wavering self-assurance pressing into his body since yesterday, prefers he not know. Unnerved, he watches Abu chase the bird off.

"Not exactly."

"Then talk to her." Genie says. "Ask her what's going on."

"What if I don't like the answer?"

He doesn't want to hear her say he's becoming insignificant, doesn't want this all-over ache to encompass the whole of him completely.

"Stop. I know this look." He hears, as Genie puts a finger up to his face. "Knock this bullshit off. You know she loves you." His tone is stern, "That girl changed the law for you don't go thinking something stupid just cause she got weird the last few days."

He's hoping it's not wishful thinking, to think she's just stressed, pressured from the responsibility of a kingdom and planning a ceremony.

"I don't know what I'm supposed to think." He says, his words soft. "I wish she'd just tell me."

"It don't work like that sometimes."

His friend says, running a hand over the stubble he's grown in the last few days. "If you wanna know what's goin' on with Jasmine, you need to ask."

Genie gets up, wipes his palms on his thighs.

"Now come on." He says, "You're not my master anymore, so get off yo ass and help me with this boat."


	10. Chapter 10

Mama Phrata lives on the outer banks of Getzistan.

It's one of seven sovereign- nation states that span past the border of Agrabah, each country supported by the trade route that runs through Jasmine's kingdom.

It's past mid-afternoon, when they make it to her old _Shaykha_'s abode, a charming piece of indo-islamic architecture with a high dome, slender minarets, and a turquoise-scalloped arch.

"It's beautiful." She hears Dalia say, as Jasmine tugs on carpet's tassels, halts the flying rug before the two, and her tiger, step off.

"Mama Phrata always appreciated the esthetic." She explains, "We go this way."

She points toward their entry, a jade painted door under a vaulted gateway. When they approach it, she knocks, and they're greeted by a heavy-set woman adorned in a purple dress ensemble; a shalwar kameez.

"My dear, Jasmine!" their host exclaims, in a middle east accent with a nuance of the west. She throws her arms around her, "How I am glad to see you again."

She hugs her past teacher back, all the years gone by and still, she smells of cinnamon and bancha, Phrata's choice tea since her excursion to Japan as a young woman.

"Dalia, welcome." she hears her say and embraces the handmaid.

For years, they spent their days in the palace _madrasah, _the private schoolroom her father built to keep her locked into her studies. This aging woman, with fine lines at her eyes and a thinning smile had been their only window to the outside world.

"Please, come inside."

She says, and directs them down a great hall, Rajah's paws pattering with every step against the ivory floor. They're led to a drawing room and a long divan, the seating covered in burgundy with gold embroidery.

"You have a beautiful home, Mama Phrata."

Dalia says, as they take their seats, and Phrata thanks her, explains she'd built the house with what she'd earned at the palace; took inspiration from the Tahj mahal, the Citadel in Agrabah, and her love for color.

She pets Rajah, tells the tiger he's as beautiful as when he came as a cub from the Armenian highlands.

There's small talk, at first, of Jasmine's new prestige, Dalia's impending maritime, of Phrata's time in India and Europe, and memories of their time together in the palace.

As much as she wants to catch up more with her old teacher, loves the child-like comfort, Jasmine came here with main intention. The sooner she gets back to the palace, the less time he has to ponder her absence.

"Mama Phrata there's..." She sets down the tea that'd been made for her. "We have some questions that I think you can answer."

The older woman nods in response, and Jasmine pulls out the scroll from the bag at her side, hands it to her.

"What can you tell us about Zena?"

She watches as Phrata takes in the painting, her mouth curving up as she runs her fingers down the paper; her dark eyes, watering from a memory of when the queen was still alive; when the palace had been filled with laughter and grace.

"She was your mother's best friend." She begins, as Rajah comes to lay by her side.

She's still staring at the picture when she continues. "I was hired to tutor your mother at the time, in the western languages, Zena arrived two months before me. She'd been a launder's daughter, came to the palace to work off her father's debts."

She pets the tiger on his head, and he begins to purr.

"She was a sweet girl, kind and beautiful. Had a shy attitude in the beginning, but she grew into her own character when the queen took her to heart."

It's now Mama Phrata frowns, looks up at Jasmine, a question in the deep line stretched across her forehead.

"You came all this way to ask about a handmaid?"

It occurs to Jasmine, she should have explained first why they have such questions, and she clutches out the items she'd stolen from his chest.

"We're asking because of these."

She sets the veil, and the dagger on the table, sees Phrata's expression change from curiosity to surprise, and when her former Shaykah brings her hand to her mouth, Jasmine realizes it's shaking slightly.

There's a tremor of something abstruse in the air; the whisper of an end to a mystery and Jasmine feels it crawl up her back, excite her bones.

Phrata reaches out, grabs the dagger, turns it over in her hands as Dalia plucks up the veil.

"Where did you get these?" Phrata asks, her voice hoarse.

"She stole them." Dalia states matter-of-factly, and confused, Phrata's frown grows deeper.

It irritates Jasmine, Dalia's sanctimonious tone, she had to deal with her self-righteous advice the whole way here, and Mama Phrata doesn't need to be subject to her apparent moral superiority.

Or Jasmine's deceit.

"They belong to the man I'm going to marry." She clarifies, ignoring Dalia while realizing she hadn't yet told Phrata of the impending union. "They're all he has of his parents. He doesn't know anything else about them."

Mama Phrata tenses on this, her whole posture changed, rigid, from a searching discernment.

"What's his name?"

She asks slowly and Jasmine answers;

"Aladdin."

The look turns, instantly, to astonishment on Phrata's face, and Jasmine sees her eyes glisten before smile lines crack her aged expression; a private joy Phrata's suddenly found by the news of his name. She's lost to herself for a minute, just staring at the dagger for so long, Jasmine thinks she may have forgotten they're there.

"Mama Phrata?" She questions, touching her knee, and it breaks the reverie. Slowly, Phrata puts down the dagger.

"I knew him as a baby."

She says finally, and this new information weighs Jasmine to her seat, stands-up the down hair on the back of her neck. Dalia too is motionless as Phrata continues.

"But I believed him dead."

Without elaborating she tugs on her blue-lined shawl, sliding the dupatta off a crown of black and silver hair. She tells them to understand the story she'll have to start at the beginning.

"The knife belonged to his father, Cassim. You were too young to remember him." She says, squeezing Jasmine's hand. "but he had been the Royal vizier, a solider from Egypt."

Jasmine was too young, but she's seen the picture; a painting that hangs in the hall of the west wing, a wall dedicated to the history of past council.

"He and the handmaid, they'd fallen in love." Phrata continues, "Your mother had supported the relationship from its infancy, encouraged it." she nods toward Jasmine "but it was forbidden. We kept it a secret, especially from your father."

It was prohibited, Jasmine knows, unlawful for any members of Council to court the females of the palace, to consummate such a relationship.

As Sultan, she'd changed that law on day four.

"The veil had been a gift from Cassim to his beloved." Phrata tells them "That, and the dress in that painting." She motions toward the open scroll on the table.

"Not long after, they were with child. Your Mama and I made sure the pregnancy stayed hidden. The baby was born five months before you, in the servant's quarters. They named the boy Aladdin."

Phrata picks up her tea, takes a sip before Jasmine says, as more a realization then a question;

"He was born in the palace?"

The old woman nods.

"There were only four of us that knew." She says. "We snuck the baby out before morning, to a domicile in the city. The boy stayed with Zena's father by day, and every night, her and Cassim would come visit the child."

How dreadful it would be, Jasmine thinks, not to be able to freely love your own baby.

"What happened to them?" She asks, as Phrata hugs her drink in her palms.

"The day your mother died..." She begins. "Cassim tracked her murderer through the bazaar, to the thieves quarters under the city." She traces the rim of her cup with a finger. "He killed the assassin, but not without suffering a fatal wound of his own."

She'd heard the stories growing up, of the brave solider who'd avenged her mother. There was never a name to the tale, and she never asked, rest assured that the deed had been done.

It was a short tale remembered, compared to the death of the Duke, Jafar's slick ascension.

Cassim had emerged the less popular victor.

"Zena was incorrigible after that day." Phrata continues, her voice sad. "When she left the palace that night, to be with her child, I never saw her again."

"What do you think happened to her?"

Dalia asks, and the old woman sets down her cup before;

"I'd heard in town that she'd died, and her father as well, from the fever that came on the boats. I 'd heard the whole household had succumb to the sickness."

It encompassed the kingdom, Jasmine remembers, the spread of the disease so bad they'd shut-up the palace, closed the ports.

"That's why when you said Aladdin's name…" Phrata says, "I was overcome with such happiness." She smiles again, her wrinkles deepening at the corners of her mouth. "I'd thought often about that poor boy, about his mother."

She turns to Jasmine, clutches her hand.

"It would make this old woman glad, if I could see the man that boy's become. Will you bring him here?"

This makes Jasmine instantly uneasy, a burning hitch in her chest of guilt, for the way she left him, for the things she's hidden.

"She can't." Dalia says. "She's been lying to him this whole time, even though I told her to tell him the truth. He doesn't even know we are here. Now, do you have any more tea?"


	11. Chapter 11

When she was a girl, there had been a fire in the Citadel, hot incense caught on parchment, burning up the building for hours, the smoke lingering for days.

_What if it burns down the whole Kingdom? _she'd asked mama Phrata, afraid, and in response her tutor had hugged her, eased her fear by stroking her hair. _It can't_, was her answer, _it takes more then a fire to burn a kingdom._

She finds herself reminiscing on the story, as she makes her way through the hall toward their room, her footsteps quiet to not disturb the palace.

They'd gotten back moments ago, right after nightfall.

Again, Dalia had reprimanded her on their way home, told her she was being selfish in her relationship to think her treachery was justified somehow. Now that she knows the whole truth, Dalia said, pointing her finger, she needs to find a way to tell him.

And she's right.

There's more to a kingdom then subjects and cities.

A kingdom is a heart's domain.

Even in his past, he's tied to her, the truth still sending tremors through her body, shudders energizing her blood with all the degrees in which they're connected.

If only he'd want to hear it, he'd know it too.

When she pushes open the door, she sees him on the balcony, sitting on the wide ledge, one foot over the banister, the other, underneath him. The torch-flames from the courtyard below illuminate him, a beatific aura that bounces off his body to land under her skin.

Like he always is, he's breathtaking.

"You're still up." She says, making conversation, but he doesn't move, doesn't speak, and it's now she feels the tension, the thickness of his silence in the air.

His attitude seeped into her bones.

"I couldn't sleep." He says, but it could have been to the space between them. Then;

"Are you gonna tell me what's going on?"

The words bounce, echo off of the terrace to creep up her spine.

This is it; this plummet of her chest, this ache in her veins, this is a kindling spark, the beginning of consequence.

"I don't-

"I know, Jasmine. I know there's something you're not telling me." He interrupts, as he slides off the railing, and when he walks toward her, he's careful. "Please don't tell me, you don't know what I'm talking about."

When he's feet from her, his eyes are sad, a russet anguish that permeated the air she'd walked in on, and its burrowing into her resolve, making her feel irrevocably selfish, small.

"What are you hiding from me? Just tell me."

He pleads, and it's his soul, raw and bare, that's breaking through his stare, begging she be honest with him, begging she see him.

This is his desperate battle cry.

And she braces herself against it, feels a twinge of panic rush through her at the thought of this fight, of its' end.

"I was- she searches for the word as she swallows, "I was researching."

He frowns, surprised.

"Researching what?"

She stalls before she says the words, the taste of them already sour on her tongue.

"Your parents." She swallows "I was researching your parents."

"What?" he asks, incredulous "Why?"

She can't find her voice, as seconds pass, and exasperated, he shakes his head, throws his hands in the air, then drops them.

"Jasmine, why?" He drags the last word out, unnerved, pacing, his reaction upset and shock at the same time. "I told you I didn't want to know."

"Well I did." And she regrets the response, as it seems to feed his irritation, his ire that she'd be so bold to pry without his permission and when he shakes his head, offended, slighted, she swallows.

"I found something." She defends. "It was a dress-

"I don't want to know." He cuts her off, his voice short, hurt. "I don't want to know, and I told you that."

"but if you would just-

"You can't do things like this without telling me."

He interrupts.

It's as if he's avoiding anything she says.

And in the glow of the room's light, she sees his shoulders tense from rising anger, braces himself against the desk in front of him. She watches his forearms stiffen when he grips the tabletop, his knuckles white, his eyes tortured, a dark brown agony that sears every nerve in her body.

This is a private abyss he's sucking her into.

"You can't dig into my past without including me." He tells her, his voice quieter than she would have liked. "Especially when I already told you it doesn't matter."

She doesn't understand this, his staunch unwillingness to even hear her out and it was starting to irritate her, she could feel it climbing up her neck.

"I found answers." She argues, and he shakes his head,

"It doesn't matter."

Now she was growing angry.

"Why?" she asks him, her voice pointed, "What are you afraid of? Why are you so against knowing-?

"Because the less I know, the more I can pretend I'm good enough for you!" he yells, and it takes her aback.

"I was a mistake, Jasmine, an accident to be abandoned. I deduced that enough from that veil." He says softer, as that dark brown turns pliable, wet, anger turned to a russet pain. "And I have had to live with that for the last fifteen years, and bringing it all up now, asking that question again now, would be to ask again why I think I even have the right to marry you."

The sheer torment in his face stops her breath, a torture of everything he's built up inside for years, and it slices into her, wounds her with his personal pain.

"That's why I don't want to know."

She wants to reach out and touch him, close the space between them with her arms and her comfort, but she's struggling under his influence, helpless under the polarity he's tuned the room to.

If only he would hear her, he would know none of this was true.

"Aladdin-" She begins.

"God, Jasmine I thought-

He stops, unable to finish when he presses his lips together, grips the table so hard she thinks it'll break. His stare is fixed across the room, caught in a distant cogitation so fragile, she thinks it'll break her.

Then he looks at her, with a dark russet so beautifully delicate, with a love so tender and powerful and overwhelming and breaking, that it knocks her breath away.

"I can't." he says suddenly, quietly, and when he turns his gaze; he throws his hands up, pushes against the air, the invisible wall between them. "I can't do this right now."

And instantly, he's moving, past her and when he's almost to the door, he turns back.

"I know that your Sultan." He says, his eyes red from the tears he quit holding back. "I know you're going to do whatever you want. But next time you want to investigate my life, don't hide it from me." That anger lines his voice again. "You don't have that right."

And when he turns to walk out, he slams the door behind him.

This is how a kingdom burns.


	12. Chapter 12

One of the earliest memories he has, is in the front of Fazud's fish shop.

He remembers the sand, in his eyes, in his mouth, filling the back of his throat, the dryness trying to choke him. He remembers the burn, the red patches, painful bumps on his skin, the sand stinging so bad he wanted to peel every layer of his flesh off. Then there's Briat, the cook, his hard voice, urging him to wake, to stand up, as rough hands had gripped his shoulders. Through the blur of age, he remembers the sling-bag, with his parents' things, slung across his body as he was dragged into the street, thrown out of the sight of paying customers, the dagger clanging as he hit the ground.

Since his childhood, he'd been disposable.

And he's trying not to let the thought overpower him here, on this bench in the west wing, the place he'd escaped to when he left her unmoving, and speechless in their bedroom.

After he'd left the shipyard this evening, he couldn't defuse the ache in his bones, his head left spinning in circles from all the secret things she could be hiding.

For days, he'd feared her silence, that she'd figured out he'd never measure up, never compare to the men in the portraits in this hall, and again in his mind, he'd become insignificant.

He'd jumped first, to the worst possible outcome, to the ending in their fairy-tale where he's too common and broken for her to want anymore.

Even his parents left him.

He'd been incensed, after she'd told him the truth, rigid from a betrayal he'd felt in his whole body. And he'd been too irate, too devastated from all the past hurts and self-blame to really hear her, his mind having replayed all the what-ifs and why's in a tortured loop so loud it rang in his ears.

After all the self-assurance he'd been trying to conjure these last months, again, he'd been reminded that he was disposable.

Then he'd look at her, beautiful in the flame light, the glow fighting for the high arcs of her face, the dips of her neckline, places he stains with kisses beneath her laughter, and it had been too much then for him to take, the anger, the love she'd betrayed, his own persecution; this beautiful creature about to validate what he already knew.

He'll always end like that memory, unimportant, abandoned, with his environment choking him alive.

It'd have been easier, he thinks now, as he scuffs a spot into the stone floor with his khussa-clad foot, if he'd never even showed her his parents' things, just kept them and his sad story to himself. Then maybe he wouldn't be sitting here, wondering if she was digging up his past for him, or for the part of her that wants to know, for sure, if where he came from was good enough.

And he'd been opposed, too emotionally resistant toward hearing it confirmed from her lips.

The thought makes him newly unsettled, the top layer of an already unsteady conviction, and he blows out a breath, rubs the back of his neck as if he could scrub out all the emotional ache.

It doesn't work.

And instantly, he feels too claustrophobic in his own flesh, all the thoughts screaming to get out of his head so viciously, he has to get up to distract himself.

There's historical resonance here, in this part of the palace, paintings and statues of her ancestors, old armor, swords, an armory of decorations lining the walls.

He runs his hand over an old scimitar, a pulwar and brass shield, weapons used to free the seven-nation states from the Safavid dynasty. His fingers roam over cold stone wall, amber and smooth, before they reach the portraits. There's her grandfather, her father, members of the council, men with dark-heavy eyes wearing headpieces and clothes of rich color that signified their positions.

He stares at the pictures, feeling in the pit of his stomach, a triviality, but he swallows it down. There's Sultan Amet, her grandfather, in a gold kurta and jeweled turban, Keiam, palace dewan, in a burgundy robe with a rolled scroll clutched in his left hand, and then there was her father, young, strong, with a black beard under a strongly-set brow, his hands folded on his white and silver lap.

These are great men of Agrabah; strong faces that led a kingdom with honor and glory.

He's come to this wing of the palace only once before, a pass brief enough to take in its' importance, it's imprint. Too strikingly, it reminded him how unexceptional he really is.

Unlike then, he continues his saunter.

There's an empty spot on the wall now, a portrait sized hole where Jafar's painting once hung, her father wanting to erase every trace of his most hated enemy.

The day they banished him, was the day he thought he'd have to walk away from her forever. He'd broken the world with the rub of a lamp, and on that day, he'd been content enough just knowing he'd put all the pieces back together.

He was resigned just knowing he'd gotten the chance to love her.

But she'd followed him, as he'd intended on walking away, urged him back with her lips and her words, told him it was her royal command that he stay and get to know her.

_You can stay here,_ she'd tell him later, when they were in the courtyard, basking under the moonlight with her tiger at their feet. Her eyes had been inviting then, promise, want and hope lined in a cinnamon gaze, with her lashes, heavy from the same desire that'd been beating under every part of him. Then shyly, it'd disappeared, and she'd smiled, _I think it'd be best. I don't think Rajah will let you leave_, she'd said, and that's when he realized that she'd still been a little awkward, a little new at being the kind of vulnerable that allowed her own happiness. And so he'd laugh, pet the tiger, the beast rolling over into his hand, and because he needed her to know he understood, he'd say_, I think you're right. I don't think your father will let me leave either. _

It was the night he knew she was perfect for him.

And it's his heart now, that drops to his toes, in humiliation of how he left her. He didn't even give her the chance to state her case and he owes it to the innocence she had on that night, the virtue, that maybe he should.

But he only runs his hand along the wall instead, a numb uninterested in running back to her and his abrupt reaction.

Then he sees it, in a portrait, the hilt of a dagger he's memorized since childhood, the lines and inscriptions coming alive on the canvas. His nerves, tapping on the backside of his skin now, he traces it, looks up to the face in the painting and instantly, he's unable to move.

The vizier has high cheek bones, a strong jaw, dark hair edging out from under the same turban in another color he's seen on a much viler man, but it's his eyes, dark-brown, kind, and powerful, as if he could devour the whole world with a stare, that make his breath drop.

_Cassim al' Asamoud._

That's the name etched into the frame, and he takes the whole painting in, the man's blue Kurta, the blue and black etching on the turban, and his eyes trace the man's hand again to a hilt he's held more nights then he cares to remember.

He hits the floor before he can catch himself.

Self-created truths are disposable.

Maybe he does need answers afterall.


	13. Chapter 13

"You said you had answers?"

When she hears the voice, it's a reverberation of smoke and exhaustion in the doorway, a cringe of noise that cuts through the quiet she'd allowed swallow her hours ago.

He'd left her here, in their room, fighting with her shame, the drowning feeling in her blood drying to her cheeks, pushing her to the floor with a force so overwhelming, she'd started to suffocate under it.

And she still can't breathe.

But he's in the doorway, and his hurt creeps into her pores so ferociously she has to gnash her teeth against it, another pain adding to her already brittle composure.

And as he makes his way to her, she can see the anguish in his face, the torture he's lived in since he left her here. "Then you can tell me why my father's dagger is painted on a portrait in the west hall?"

That's why it'd looked so familiar, the knife, why when she'd held it that day in the marketplace the color and design had knocked on her memory.

She'd admired that hall since childhood.

She hesitates to answer, a heavy inhalation of caution, but can see from the slack in his shoulders he's given up his tense attitude.

So she braves it.

"Because Cassim al Asamoud is your father."

When she says this, his face breaks, the angles softening as he tries to grasp it, his eyes a liquescent brown-ocher, searching for an anchor to ground what she's just told him. In the search, he has to steady himself, his whole body unsure, so he pulls himself down to sit on the bed.

"I don't- he opens his hands, his eyes caught on them as if they held the answers he's trying to find. "How did you-

"My old _Shaykah." _She tells him, still weary "Mama Phrata. She knew of everything inside these walls when I was a girl. I knew if anyone had answers, it would be her."

He's lost, when he looks to her, his whole composition stuck between astonishment and confusion, so she climbs next to him, dips the bed when she reaches behind him for the bag she threw, her satchel tossed aside after he'd left.

For only seconds she's hesitant, his aggravation again a risk in the back of her mind, but she takes out the dagger anyway, and the veil, lays them in the space between them, prays their story will dispel whatever antipathy he still has toward her excursion.

"I took these to her." She reports, as he picks up the knife, stares at it as if he's looking again for some tether in the blue grains. "And this."

When she pulls out the scroll, the line in his brow creases deep, this new item a mystery, and she unrolls it, passes it to him slowly. She watches his eyes catch on the picture, that crease relaxing as he takes in her mother, the other figure. Then he looks at her, an aching question in his stare because he's just realized the veil, and she feels the stun of his revelation, goosebumps crawled onto her skin, a tremor of his surprise that makes her shift in her seat from the force of it.

"This woman," she points to the handmaid, tries to wriggle out of his invisible hold. "This is Zena. She's your mother."

Everything she's made of drops to her feet then, from the gravitational pull of his nerves, the shockwave in his system that's bled into her airspace, and she clutches the bed at her sides to halt the descent.

She watches as his fingers reach out, trace the outline of the handmaid's face, her hair, then he stops on the veil at the crown of her head. It's some invisible place he's gone again, in his head, his gaze held on the red color so forcefully, she thinks the pigment, and her strength, might pull away.

He knows her face.

In some memory somewhere, from this picture, he's remembered his mother's face.

"She um- he has to clear his throat from the emotion that's wetting his stare, "She knew your mother?"

"Yes." She answers, with the kind of softness this moment deserves. "She was her handmaid."

She explains how his mother came to the palace, how she came into her own and Mama Phrata's connection to her. All the while he remains stoic, unmoving from his place in the picture.

"It's how she met your father."

This turns his eyes to her, a russet eagerness lined with sadness, and it's so delicate, she feels it melt into the air, tear into her breath. And she thinks he wants to comment, say something about the connections he's already made from the picture in the hall, the title in the clothes, but he doesn't.

Under the weight of everything exhumed, he can't find the words.

But she does.

She tells him of his father's position, his lineage and love, of the law that forbade his parents courtship and the consequence of it.

"With my mother's help, and Mama Phrata's, the pregnancy was kept hidden." She tells him, watches as again, he turns his stare to the nothing in the distance. "You were born here in secret, in the servants' quarters."

She's waiting for him to ask how she can be sure of all this. Or does she trust her old tutor, but he doesn't, just sits still, soaking everything in through the quiet.

And he's worrying his lower lip, before he rubs a hand across his mouth, leaves it there when he braces his elbows atop his knees, a slow absorption from the same distant place he's fastened his thoughts. She watches him swallow, as his eyes grow glazed, wet, and when he blows out a breath, it shakes his whole body.

And the air is permeated by this private deliberation, a struggle of his want and acceptance that pushes his self-isolation into her bones.

From the place where he never could have imagined such a past, he's slowly latching on to the possibility.

She never thought it would hurt him this much to do it.

"You were named here." She says. "It's how mama Phrata knew of you."

This makes his breath shake again, when he exhales, his eyes still locked onto nothing, and she watches his jaw set, the skin of his cheeks indent when he grinds his back teeth. Then she sees the single tear formed, catching the flame- light of the terrace as it drags down his cheek and he catches it with the back of his hand. And because he's overwhelmed from her study, from himself, he stretches a hand over his eyes, his thumb against his right temple and his forefinger his left, a shield to his vulnerability, a blanket under scrutiny.

All of a sudden, she's become an unwanted guest to his private party.

For seconds, it's quiet, he unmoving and she unable in the choke of his air. There's only the bubbling fountain outside, the night-wind through the terrace, the breeze carrying his reticence through every corner of the room like a silent melody.

The swan song of his once-buried past.

Then he speaks.

"What um…" the words cut through the silence, and he drops his hand, blinks hard, looks to the ceiling to calm himself, to catch a swill, to pretend he's not as effected as he is. "What happened after? To me? To…to my mother?"

His teeth clamp thin flesh again, when he bites his bottom lip, and as his nostrils flare, he focuses his concentration on the ground, a safeguard to the fleeting emotion that's already broken through his ocher-brown wall.

He's doing everything he can, to be alone in his distress.

It only makes her want to hold him more.

"You were taken to your grandfather." She tells him, "Your mother and father they came after dusk to see you, when they could escape the palace."

"I don't remember any of this."

He says to that obscure place, his focus muddled, and she continues.

"Your father he…" she swallows, "He died the same day my mother did. He'd-

"I know the story." He says, and the words reverberate through his palms when he covers his face with both hands. "I know what happened to the Vizier that day."

He shut down another hurt, doesn't want to relive the tale with a name to the face, with his father as the sacrifice.

He'd already lost him once.

"Yeah." She confirms, and he nods his head.

"Your mother, she left the palace after that." She tells him, "She went home to you."

He looks at her now, his face gentle, his eyes light-russet through the redness of held tears, and in them a question.

What became of her?

"Mama Phrata heard she got sick, when the smallpox sickness came." She answers, watches as his brow and chest quiver, "She'd heard the whole household died."

She feels his reaction drag her down again, a crushing weight that presses into her sternum so hard, she fights for breath.

She has to inhale so deep; she feels dizzy.

And when it grows quiet again, it carries through the room.

"One of my only memories," he tells her finally, as he rubs an invisible mark into the bed post, "I'd woken up in the sand, in front of a fish shop. All I had were the clothes on my back and those." He points to the items next to her on the bed, now the relics of an unspoken truce.

He sniffs, blows out a shaky breath and through his desolation, he continues. "I remember the blisters, the pain on my skin. And I remember I'd felt, lost, tired, as if all my energy had drained somewhere, to the place I'd just been."

He braces an arm on the bed column, lays his forehead against it and closes his eyes, the fatigue of his personal cage taking its toll. She'd reach out, touch him, if not for the impenetrable ambience he's trapped himself in.

"The sickness must have taken my past." He tells her "Robbed me of my life before then."

She'd heard of the memory losses, after the infection, the illness having gripped on so hard, it left blackness in its wake.

The palace physicians called it _bab almawt_; death's door.

He gets up, paces a space.

"And until now..." He says, "I had a childhood with no beginning."

He looks at her, and it's not so frail this time, his eyes not so tormented, instead they're soft, differently delicate, an ocher of gratitude, compassion.

He's exhausted his unapproachable place now.

That ocher grows dark now, lined with a russet forgiveness, and when he smiles at her, softly, there's an air of relief that breaks through the room, a prevue of his buoyancy that gives her heart comfort for the first time in hours.

He comes to her, sits back on the bed, and when he does, he picks up the veil, runs it in and out his fingers, and she watches his rings gleam, pulling the outside light in under the silk.

"Of all the ways I imagined how I was born, where I came from..." He tells her, "This wasn't even close."

He has a curt grin, but she doesn't know what to say, just watches as he concentrates on the threads, skimming over a piece of gold trim with his thumbnail.

"I like this truth a lot better."

She smiles this time, but he loses his, draws it down.

"I'm um-I'm sorry." He tells her. "About before. You didn't deserve that."

There's indignity and embarrassment written into his expression, a shame he hasn't yet come to terms with, but she knows it was justified, warranted even.

The moment she decided not to tell him; was the moment she'd asked for it.

"You were right. "she tells him, "I should have included you."

He nods, then shrugs.

"I shouldn't have been so against learning the truth." He admits, "I guess I thought-

"That it would matter too much? Where you came from?"

She's known since day one the insecurities he has of himself, the illusive disgraces he's convinced make him contemptible.

She knows what he argues with himself.

"I didn't want that stain on you, on your father." He says, "I was already a thief, and a liar. Add a prostitute's son to that and it's a trifecta of bad decision,"

He shifts on the bed, a little uneased having said it aloud, and to comfort, she grabs his hand, presses it between her own, the touch sending prickles of heat through to her fingertips.

"I've already told you," she says, "No matter what your past, childhood or otherwise, all that matters is who you are now. "

His eyes are deep russet, soft but intense when he looks at her, flittering on the verge of growing dark, love, need and desire in one exciting stare, and she feels it ignite her blood, rush to her toes from the outside in.

"And how you make me feel when you look at me this way."

That striking darkness takes over when he asks;

"And how's that?"

"Like I'm the only woman in the world you'll ever love."

His lashes are heavy, and she feels her pulse start to quicken when his study intensifies, ignites the molten heat in her core that begs she taste him.

Then, because he lives to toy with her, he releases his hold.

"Well, you do have a palace..." He says, sarcastically. "Riches, expensive silks, a Kingdom."

"I have you."

She cuts in, knowing that he knows full well, he'll forever be more precious than any of those things.

He smiles, any vestige of his earlier conflict gone.

"Always."


	14. Chapter 14

It's been three weeks since she told him of his parents.

He's hung the dagger in the west hall, next to his father's picture, the veil too, she added the paintings she found in the chest in the library, and he gave Dalia his mother's dress after she'd spoke of it, again, with longing awe.

Before he left for Italy , her father lamented over the additions to the palace, sharing stories with his future son, of Cassim's endeavors, his accomplishments.

I _know now my boy,_ he'd told Aladdin with glassed eyes, _where you get your good heart and impeccable character, praise Allah!_ And he'd hugged him then, overjoyed with knowing his old friend lives on, through his son, through a new lineage.

There was a new connection to bind a familial accord.

He has a lightness about him now, her betrothed, an untroubled quality, as if all the confidence he needed lied in the closure of his past, a reawakening of spirit that's called him to consent to his father's old position.

He doesn't wear the uniform, won't conform to turbans or cloaks, like he doesn't conform to battle strategies or as he calls adversarial mediation. Instead he's reformed the role, taken to outlining water canals for the city, renovating the public academies, or contributing to the design of the carracks in the shipyard.

Being an architect, an engineer, fits him like a beautiful second skin.

She watches him, from across the banquet table, uninterested anymore in the figs and naan that made up her breakfast. His feet are crossed atop the corner of the tabletop, as he lounges back in his chair, he's got his attention in a book about Egyptian chronology, as he slides the monkey on the table his half-eaten persimmon.

In this whole new world, he finally feels like he belongs.

He's grown his hair out, dark wisps that wave out above his ears, down the nape of his neck, silk tresses she tangles her fingers in when he's grasping for breath against her collarbone. There's stubble too, where his face was once smooth, course growth that leaves her skin red and raw, melts every nerve-end in her lower body when it scrapes her into oblivion.

The thought quickens her blood, incites every plexus from her core downward, and she clamps down against the liquid heat of it.

He thrills her in every way possible.

She'd be damned if he didn't know it too.

"I'm gonna have to start charging you for staring at me." His nose is still buried in the book, when he says this. "Imagine the fortune I'd make."

She snorts at this, a little embarrassed, a little annoyed but leave it to him to throw her mid-day stupors back in her face.

"You already have a fortune."

"You're right." That sideways grin spreads across his face, and before she can respond with something smart, he's slid across the table, and when he tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear, his eyes grow dark. And it takes her back to the time they just met, when he brushed her hair like this, a moment of sweetness that took her by surprise, the beginning of her fall.

"I'm very fortunate."

He says and raises her chin, presses his lips to hers in a light kiss, then he leans back, sits on the table. He stares at his hands, turns the ring on his index finger over, there's somethings on his mind he's too moved to say without premeditation, without the grateful appreciation drawing the upturned corner of his mouth.

"Thank you, for letting me know Mama Phrata." He finally says, as he straightens a gold wrinkle out of his tunic. "She's the closest thing to my parents I'll ever have."

The morning after she revealed his lineage, he asked to go see her old tutor.

When he'd entered her home, Mama Phrata knew instantly, who he was, throwing her arms around him and kissing his neck. Aladdin had been a little apprehensive, a little awkward in the arms of a stranger, but he'd warmed suddenly when she'd examined his face, mentioned his mother's cheekbones, his father's dimples, the same kind eyes she'd stared into when she'd swaddled him after birth.

"You've made me glad this day, Aladdin." She'd said, her mouth shaking with emotion, with age. "Now come, my child, we've many things to say."

The two had bonded then, over stories of his parents, she'd tell him of his mother's love of music, how she taught the whole palace how to play strings, and he'd tell her how his mother's song is all he remembered. She'd tell him his father was kind, gave away every penny he'd earned, and he'd tell her how he stole to survive as a child, how he'd have given anything to know his father.

That morning, two strangers became familiar souls.

"You do know your father." Mama Phrata would say later, during their fourth visit, and he'd frown when a thin smile would stretch across her face. "He's alive in you. In your heart, and in your character." She'd tell him. "Your mother too. Why do you think you were able to get this _Ameera's _attention?"

And she'd smile across the room then, to her past student, the girl she'd raised as her own daughter till she was eighteen. Mama Phrata couldn't be more proud of the man she'd chosen.

And as Jasmine takes his hand now, she thinks neither could she.

"Of course." She tells him. "I'm happy you found your past."

"You found my past." He corrects and it makes her blush, embarrassed under the praise of a deception she's still sorry for. He knows because he brings her knuckles to his lips, "And you gave me a future."

He says, over her hand and it's an assurance that he's forgiven her, after everything that's come from it, he's accepted she was genuine in her reasons to find out about his past, despite how.

"I always knew there was nothing you can't do."

He says and it hit's her hard, in the feelgood places of her heart to have such loving admiration.

He sees more in her then, even in her weak moments, she can see in herself.

He's her greatest untamed asset.

"I can't be any happier."

She states, truly and when he smiles, beautifully, it pushes into her all the reasons why he feels the same way.

But then that smile grows teasing.

"I'd say that makes two of us but…" he looks behind him. "I can't speak for Abu."

The monkey is asleep on the tabletop now, covered in fruit cores and pieces that stain his new, brightly colored outfit, a yellow fez and pink vest, a glutton in his new state.

"But it's a safe bet it may be true."

He finishes chuckling, and she laughs, as he'd intended.

"You're ridiculous."

She admits, and he frowns playfully.

"You like that about me."

"Maybe." Then she raises a brow, "Or maybe I like something else of yours."

That russet of desire sneaks back into his stare as he judges her words, and she can feel the vestige of something sexual brim under her skin, only until his teasing smile stretches across his face.

"You know I get worked up when you talk about my mind that way."

He's caught her, in the same way he'll always catch her, with his wit, his brilliance, and she wants nothing more than to bask in it the rest of her life.

It's why in two weeks they'll marry, under a pagoda in the same place her parents married, and she'll give him her father's ring, and he'll promise to value and cherish her above all others.

"I love you."

She tells him, from the deepest part of the swell in her chest.

"I know."


End file.
